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Fri, 18 Aug 2017 04:25:11 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1Spaces—Containershttp://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/spaces%e2%80%94containers/
http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/spaces%e2%80%94containers/#commentsFri, 28 Jul 2017 12:29:50 +0000Travis Diehl]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/?p=10040737Spaces is a feature of art-agenda that proposes a thematic examination of exhibition spaces based on the analysis of their physical and spatial configurations. Every two months, art-agenda publishes a new reflection on galleries’ architecture, identity, and relation with their historical and geographical context. The latest instalment of Spaces considers the history of displaying contemporary art in shipping containers.

In August 2016, as global logistics firms slumped toward overcapacity, South Korean shipping giant Hanjin went conspicuously belly up. Over 80 of their cargo ships were suddenly turned away from ports around the world, while hundreds of multinational crew faced the further problem of securing either safe repatriation or another job. It was disaster for Hanjin, but a lucky break for Vancouver’s Access Gallery: among the sailors on a Hanjin carrier drifting beyond Tokyo was an artist, Rebecca Moss, whose “Twenty-Three Days at Sea” travelling artist residency stretched to a tense twenty-five. Suddenly, the obscure transit over distant ocean—what Allan Sekula calls the “forgotten space”—was making headlines in a way that an art project rarely does.

Hanjin bowed out just 60 years after Malcom McLean, a truck driver-turned-logistics capitalist, patented the 33-foot precursor to today’s standardized 40-foot container. Thanks to containerized shipping, irregular goods became regularized “flows”—timetables, tonnages, coordinates, and costs(1)—and the calculus of global trade achieved truly incomprehensible scale. This smooth logistical abstraction, by which we can forget that most goods still travel by ship, is coupled, dramatically, with the visual abstraction of the container—rack after rack of colorful, branded boxes, contents unknown; a found minimalism, a volumetric neo-geo. If these former logistical concerns are perhaps better understood by non-art specialists, this latter aesthetic dimension gives art an in. Indeed, the art world has been infatuated by cargo containers since the early aughts—not only using them for the setting of residencies like “Twenty-Three Days at Sea” and the aptly named Container Artist Residency, but employing them as art fair booths, mobile galleries, and sculpture materials. Yet as with the extent of global shipping itself, a kind of inbuilt invisibility lubricates the system. The art-world ubiquity of the standard shipping container goes largely unremarked—until something goes wrong.

Moss, part seafaring laborer, part a containerized good herself, became an accidental symbol of a globalized art industry operating with little oversight under its own flags of convenience. Meanwhile, the art market hurries art objects toward an ultimate commodification. Today even a very famous painting might be bought sight unseen and immediately parked in a container at a freeport in Switzerland, sometimes to change hands again without changing location. Sekula memorably calls the cargo container the “very emblem of capitalist disavowal”;(2) the opaque box, indifferent to its contents, sheers goods from their specificity and abstracts the labor of their production and transport. Art “appreciates” in purely financial terms; it is not appreciated.(3)

As Picassos languish in Geneva, the next hot buys are on view at the fairs—sometimes already containerized. Art Basel Miami Beach inaugurated the trend in 2002, in its first edition, with the Art Positions program, a selection of “cutting-edge” galleries housed in an off-site block of “shipping containers converted to public art spaces by avant-garde architects.”(4) The segment was billed as an opportunity for galleries who couldn’t afford true booths to nonetheless have a shot with Art Basel clientele. Turning steel boxes into white cubes is both practically and conceptually convenient—a mark of global motility to signal the transactional ease of a global fair. Fittingly, the project was initially sponsored by Danzas, once the fair’s official logistics partner.

The containerized gallery isn’t a destination so much as a vehicle. The shipping container, for art and otherwise, is a logistical solution—readymade, modular, cheap, deployable, and revocable. At Documenta 14 in Kassel, when organizers needed a ground level entrance for art displayed in a disused underground train station, they topped the old stairwell with a container. (“The lower level suggests a point of transit,” read the press materials, “in this case, of artworks that have perhaps just arrived or are about to depart.”) Elsewhere, as with Art Positions, the container offers flexible access to the more staid, brick-and-mortar nodes of commerce. The Hot Box container gallery project in Phoenix, for instance, opened on gallery row in 2016. In New York, the DiVA Video Art Fair (2005-2008) included DiVA Streets, a handful of containers placed in “strategic areas of Chelsea.”(5) Nearby, the Photoville fair, annual since 2011, stacked containers into a dockside display of documentary media—if not of globalization itself, then of images of globalized society.

As the shipping container’s novelty has worn thin, the desires it formalizes have grown plain. From 2005–2012, ContainerArt, a defunct worldwide container-based exhibition project, visited Edmonton, Vancouver, and a series of Italian port cities. The organizers envisioned “empty containers ambling around the world, filling with beauty wherever they stop.”(6) Such a modular anymuseumwhatever—space without location and transaction without movement—is nothing less than the abstract endgame of logistics.

In the container, this symbolic “immateriality” remains welded to an irrevocable structure. From Photoville on the harbor to Chelsea’s gentrified warehouses, containerized art marks the overlap between global art and global shipping, as both make landfall in the same post-industrial districts. In Chelsea, for instance—historically the meatpacking district, all docks and warehouses—the High Line that terminates at Renzo Piano’s Whitney Museum once carried containers. When Daly Genik (now Kevin Daly Architects) turned an old aircraft factory into the south campus of Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Design in 2004, at the height of the container craze, they couldn’t resist a post-industrial flourish: jammed into the ground at crystalline angles near the west entrance are five whitewashed containers. What was meant as a kind of local specificity (the port of L.A. is among North America’s largest) is not so local or specific (one container port looks much like the next). More durable is the signal to students that global commodities are still designed and packaged within.

The “abstract,” even classically minimalist format of the container remains irresistible to urban designers. Even where no vacant warehouse or factory exists, a container or two might provide new construction with a dislocated post-industrial chic. The typology expands from galleries to their accoutrements—coffee kiosks, bars, shops—and, inevitably, to housing.(7) As with other artistic uses of post-industrial space, practical measures (cheapness, availability) have become an aesthetic: the cultured taste that reimagines greasy factories as sun-filled lofts now sees airless boxes as efficient homes. It’s worth underscoring how these latter-day, trendy developments are entirely voluntary. When Rob Rhinehart, founder and CEO of tech-minded meal replacement brand Soylent, attempted to live in a bright red container airlifted to a hilltop in L.A.’s Lincoln Heights, he did so in the luxury of choice. Like a cruel parody of international modernism, the 40-foot unit had been punched with panoramic windows, and contained little besides a bed. Inside and outside indeed blurred, as this particular experiment in sustainable living was quickly abandoned to blight.(8)

The container is both surface and volume—the emblem of capitalist disavowal, and a box for that which is disavowed. For those in the developed world who don’t load and unload goods for a living, the inside provides a hard steel thrill akin to a tour on a decommissioned battleship, where most of the moving parts have been painted frozen. This groomed novelty masks a violent utility.Where a container gallery or booth might offer access to richer markets, identical containers serve to smuggle human cargo desperate for more basic opportunities.(9) Sekula’s Fish Story (1996), the definitive essay on the subject, includes several photographs of waterfront vendors who sell snacks to container-port workers by day and sleep inside beached containers. This is a living experiment, too; but it is not sustainable. In this light, civic proposals to use containers to house the homeless, detain refugees,(10) or even fast-track a retirement home have the tang of schemes to store undesirables out of sight. As Stefano Harney and Fred Moten remind us, logistics is inherently anti-subjective, and the shipping container a relentlessly anti-human object.(11)

Yet in this, too, the container’s sheer “neutral” materiality might broker denial. Art’s adoption of the shipping container expresses honesty and cynicism: art is a business, art/artists are commodities, so why not inhabit the bare symbol of logistical abstraction? Perhaps this much is old news. And perhaps, where we’re attuned to globalization’s considerable human cost, we remain in thrall to the container’s power to abstract the most uncomfortable congruencies into a 40-foot block of forgotten space.

(1) Even so, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten write in The Undercommons that the fledgling logistics of midcentury owed its success to the adoption of the shipping container by the U.S. military: “Containerization was failing as a business innovation until the American government used containers to try to supply its troops in South East Asia with enough weapons, booze, and drugs to keep them from killing their own officers, to keep a war going that could not be won strategically.” Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Fantasy in the Hold,” The Undercommons (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 89.
(2) Allan Sekula, in conversation with Debra Risberg, “Imaginary Economies,” Dismal Science (Normal: Illinois State University, 1999), 248.
(3) See Graham Bowley and Doreen Carvajal, “One of the World’s Greatest Art Collections Hides Behind This Fence,” The New York Times, May 28, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/arts/design/one-of-the-worlds-greatest-art-collections-hides-behind-this-fence.html.
(4) See the description of Art Positions on the Art Basel Miami Beach 2002 website, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20021105113856/http://www.artbasel.com:80/miami_beach/key_facts/index.html.
(5) See the DiVA Fair website, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20070227020243/http://www.divafair.com/ny_07/diva.html.
(6) http://www.containerart.org.
(7) See Fiona Shipwright, “Here’s Johnny… A Container Village for Students in Berlin,” uncube blog, September 23, 2015, http://www.uncubemagazine.com/blog/15970711. See also the architect Peter DeMaria, famous for his “cargo container based buildings”: http://demariadesign.com/2/.
(8) See Rory Caroll, “Soylent CEO’s shipping container home is a ‘middle finger’ to LA, locals say,” The Guardian, July 27, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/27/soylent-ceo-rob-rhinehart-shipping-container-home-la.
(9) See Aidan Lewis, “Bodies of 27 migrants recovered in west Libya, 13 in shipping container,” Reuters, February 23, 2017, http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-migrants-libya-idUKKBN16225U.
(10) See Patrick Wintour, “Hungary to detain all asylum seekers in container camps,” The Guardian, March 7, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/07/-hungary-to-detain-all-asylum-seekers-in-container-camps.
(11) See Harney and Moten, “Fantasy in the Hold.”

]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/spaces%e2%80%94containers/feed/0Martino Gamper’s “Middle Chair”http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/martino-gampers-%e2%80%9cmiddle-chair%e2%80%9d/
http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/martino-gampers-%e2%80%9cmiddle-chair%e2%80%9d/#commentsTue, 25 Jul 2017 12:19:43 +0000Francis McKee]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/?p=10040689The marriage of Italian designer Martino Gamper and Pollok House in Glasgow, set up by The Modern Institute, is a perfect match. Originally the ancestral home of the Stirling-Maxwell baronetcy, the house was built in 1752 and is run now by the National Trust as a public museum. Much of the furniture in the house today is not native to the site, having been imported by the Trust at various points in the history of the building.

All of this provides the ideal context for Martino Gamper’s intervention, which replaces several chairs in the house’s collection with his own unique designs (as well as providing chairs for invigilators and visitors). The unity of the house and its furniture has been disrupted over the years, and so the mongrelization of the interiors is echoed in the hybridity of chairs such as Fortezza (all works 2017) and Bobbin Ball. These draw on modernist design, but with elements collaged together from various periods and styles. Moreover, objects such as croquet mallets are absorbed into the furniture with a knowing wink towards the pastimes of mansion owners.

The surprise in this context lies in the peculiar mixture of aesthetic shock and familiarity. On one level Gamper’s chairs—some rescued from dereliction, others rectified and sliced open, all grafted together with varying degrees of humor, design archeology, and diabolical experimentation—chafe against the formal and domestic interior of Pollok House. At the same time though, confusingly, they settle in quite well. This odd impact is rooted in the history of the chair itself. A luxury item for most of history, chairs only begin to proliferate in the eighteenth century (around the same time Pollok House came into being). It is also an item of furniture that morphs continually in form but never varies in function. The chair does not evolve in the same way as many objects: instead, its shape mutates to reflect fashion, status, and manufacturing capabilities. It’s an object, then, capable of continual change but always familiar.

Gamper’s interest in chairs is also grounded in their intimate relationship to the human body. It is the trace of the body in the chair that interests him, the ways in which the chair can subtly mold the body and the limits the human body places on the design of any chair. Few objects in a household speak so clearly of the human presence and chairs, like clothes, tell us much about their owners’ approach to life (the New England Shakers’ chairs must be one of the great examples of object as embodiment of belief). The history of the chair is also closely aligned to the emergence of the individual human subject in the eighteenth century. Previously benches had been the main form of seating, emphasizing communality and shared space. The rise of the capitalist subject in Europe was marked by the creation of private space, the acknowledgement of individual ego and the expression of the unique self through consumer objects: the chair became a quiet symbol of this social transition.

Dropping Gamper’s chairs into Pollok House disturbs this cozy history. The house is typical of its period and status in achieving the appearance of social and aesthetic unity—rooms and artifacts pulling together all the strands of industry, art, and craft that, combined, express the acme of Western civilization and power. That way of life is stated modestly in these country mansions (part of its persuasive strength) and it manifests the European society that foundered during the First World War. The colors and bold geometrical designs in works like Campaign Chair or Curvo Chair 1 recall the disruptive art that emerged after that war. Even more telling are the techniques Gamper employs—collage, cut-ups, found objects, and dissonant juxtapositions all echo the aesthetic ruptures of twentieth-century art. The stable Newtonian gravity of nineteenth-century European interior design is challenged by a wild array of alternative physics that Gamper’s chairs bring into play. His slices through chair legs, and arm rests, open up other dimensions. The absorption of everyday objects and images such as croquet mallets or evening suits into the bone structure of the chairs demonstrates the unreliability of space and time.

The way in which Gamper constructs each chair adds an interesting footnote to this general deconstruction of the capitalist/consumer paradigm. Raiding the remains of great furniture factories and the scrapped leftovers of markets and streets, Gamper dismantles and uniquely reassembles his objects. The detritus of mass manufactured designs is subjected to a craft process that takes the original material beyond its earlier commercial life. This process also undermines the “design star” system that celebrates names such as Marcel Breuer, Charlotte Perriand, Eero Saarinen, or Eileen Gray, submerging them in the seemingly infinite horde of anonymous chair makers. Paradoxically, the mutant particularity of each Gamper hybrid disturbs our sense of ourselves as individuals defined by our consumer tastes. The gentle freakishness of each object devours the notion of the replica.

]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/martino-gampers-%e2%80%9cmiddle-chair%e2%80%9d/feed/0Nick Bastis’s “Sentries”http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/nick-bastis%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9csentries%e2%80%9d/
http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/nick-bastis%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9csentries%e2%80%9d/#commentsFri, 21 Jul 2017 16:39:11 +0000Simone Menegoi]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/?p=10040646“Can you see anything?” Lord Carnarvon anxiously asked Howard Carter, who was peering, through a small hole by the light of a candle, into the anteroom of the tomb of Tutankhamun. “Yes, wonderful things!” was his famous answer. Viewers who access Nick Bastis’s exhibition do not see “wonderful things”; on the contrary, because of the contrast between the dazzling Roman summer light and the semi-darkness of the gallery, for the first few seconds we see almost nothing. Nevertheless we have, like the great English archeologist, the impression of being on the threshold of a recently excavated burial space. There is no neon or halogen lamp, only daylight from the entrance door and from an arched window, normally covered, which has been opened for the occasion. A few meters from the entrance the light is already dim, and darkness reigns at the furthest end of the gallery.

At first sight, the only presence in the whole vast space is an old wardrobe. Inside it we discover two cylindrical metal objects that the artist calls “flutes” (Flutes with Armoire, 2017) and two small round shapes that materialize the volume drawn by a key turning in a lock (909, 2017). Which doors are opened by these dysfunctional keys? To which ultra-mundane dwellings does this place give access? And those mute flutes, do they serve to appease the gods of the underworld? It’s clear that sound—or rather its evocation—plays a fundamental role in the physical and conceptual architecture of this place. Along the walls, in four different locations, short plastic and metal segments, red and gray, are arranged horizontally or vertically according to a precise rhythmic pattern (Grocery dividers and sound emitters, 2016-17). From the caption, we find out that they contain rice and glass beads. We can imagine that, if agitated, they’d generate some sort of buzz. Who, or what, are they meant to call? (or, alternatively, keep at a distance?)

Following such speculations, we feel less like Carter and more like the protagonist of David Macauley’s graphic novel Motel of the Mysteries (1979): an archeologist in the future unearths a 1970s American motel, believing it to be a dynastic tomb, and interprets objects—from a telephone to a toilet brush—accordingly, leading to a chain of hilarious misunderstandings. In fact, the archeologist here is Nick Bastis, whose formal strategies charge trivial objects with an esoteric aura. Yet Bastis does not dig into the near past nor fetishize the conceptual and material tools of archeology, as per Dieter Roelstraete’s observations on the “archaeological imagery” of much recent art.(1) His is instead a fictitious, prospective archeology: it evokes a future in which the traces of our present have become the remnants of a remote civilization. This is also what happens in the exhibition’s Holy of Holies, the room at the end of the gallery. There a video projection shows, at a slow and meditative pace, apparently random fragments of films, documentaries, and old television programs (Seconds, 2017), and a long silent sequence that seems to be built out of the scraps of a political history program (The non-attached, 2017). As in the main environment, we have the impression of facing relics—the fragments of an individual or collective past—the intrinsic banality of which do not diminish the whole.

In a text written on the occasion of the exhibition, the artist claims to be interested not in deciphering a given meaning, but in its creation by the spectator. In this sense, rather than by some vague formal similarities, it is legitimate to compare this exhibition to the work of an artist like Trisha Donnelly. Donnelly’s formal scarcity and silence impose a radical distance between the spectator and her works; a distance where both the excitement of a discovery, and the frustration of searching for a meaning that is always elusive, co-exist. Less drastic than Donnelly, Bastis grants the viewer a greater opening-up, the possibility of a nearly narrative path (such as that proposed here, albeit with a high degree of speculative freedom). But this does not mean we should lower our guard: in the “foreword” e-mail sent as an invitation to the exhibition,(2) the artist warned viewers that “groups of works consist of the audible and the visible, and also of the inaudible and of the invisible, or, the gaps that these properties rest in … These gaps can be seen, heard and touched, which is in some way friendly but also feels like the proximity that Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Kabir, and Pacino advise you to have to your enemy.”

]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/nick-bastis%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9csentries%e2%80%9d/feed/0“Letter from Istanbul”http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/%e2%80%9cletter-from-istanbul%e2%80%9d/
http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/%e2%80%9cletter-from-istanbul%e2%80%9d/#commentsThu, 20 Jul 2017 14:50:58 +0000Filipa Ramos and Morgan Quaintance]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/?p=10040590In curating “Letter from Istanbul” at Pi Artworks, London, Morgan Quaintance combined multiple approaches to examine the cultural, social, and political life of Istanbul. He expanded the format of the exhibition to open a direct dialogue between artworks and diverse materials and documents, while also including radio broadcasts and a documentary film. In this conversation with Filipa Ramos, Quaintance reflects on his intentions, interests, and methodologies while also considering the limits of grasping, displacing, and presenting the socio-cultural context of a city in the form of an “informal dispatch.”

Filipa Ramos: When I first visited “Letter from Istanbul,” a group of students were using the public space of the show to reflect upon it. I was particularly interested by one overheard comment, in which a woman maintained that “it’s difficult to know where the curator ends and the art begins due to the combination of documentation and artworks.” So maybe we could address this first: what was your intention in presenting journalistic materials—music pamphlets, political documents, scenes from various demonstrations, books, and texts—alongside artworks?

Morgan Quaintance: I think at the root of “Letter from Istanbul” was the impulse to curate an exhibition as abstracted city report or informal dispatch. But, instead of having key sociocultural, political, and historical information stuck up as expository wall texts, I used images, documents, and books to indirectly point to those details.

I should also say that the authored works identified as art were themselves a mixture of reportage, video activism, and, for want of a better expression, “contemporary art.” I don’t really see a massive distinction between them, but it’s important to say that some of the works hadn’t been presented in a gallery setting before. My intention in bringing them together was to ignore whatever interdisciplinary hierarchical distinctions there may be and to take advantage of the heightened mode of spectatorship that can exist in the art exhibition context. So work that might only be seen online and perhaps inattentively scanned as video journalism could be considered without all the distractions that come with staring at browsers on a laptop, smartphone, or tablet.

FR: It is this variegated approach to a context—the way in which Istanbul’s music culture, historic recollections, political discourses, activisms, literature, theater, and subjective accounts are woven together—that emerges as the exhibition’s strength. The artworks on view take part in, without dominating, this scenario.

MQ: A good example of what I wanted to achieve was provided by two works from filmmaker and video activist Fatih Pınar (Gay Pride in Istanbul [2014] and September 10 [2013]). They were placed among a constellation of images and materials I’d chosen, and both videos are of people protesting or marching in the streets around Taksim Square and Istiklal Street in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu area. On one screen there was footage of demonstrations that followed the Gezi uprisings in May 2013, and on the other footage of the Gay Pride parade in 2014.

The materials placed around the Gay Pride in Istanbul work spoke to gay cultural history through images of Zeki Müren (seen by many as Turkey’s first openly gay icon) and Bülent Ersoy (a transgender performer who was persecuted in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup, but is now feted by the government and seems to have conservative sympathies). There were also images of the repression of Pride in 2015, where water canons, rubber bullets, and other excessive shows of force were used by police to disperse the crowd and stop the parade.

A similar rationale was used in choosing the materials that surrounded Pınar’s post-Taksim demonstration footage: images of the construction work that led to the Gezi uprisings, as well as newspaper articles and satirical cartoons from that time. These images blend with ephemera (leaflets and so on) that I gathered while I was in Istanbul during the recent referendum, and these in turn blend with images of people—the Death Metal musicians, for example—that I met for the documentary I was shooting while I was there.

FR: The documentary provides a generous entry point to the exhibition. Visitors are introduced to the people, places, and situations that shaped your research. These moments and events are typically kept behind the scenes of a show, or at best emerge through a series of tightly edited interviews with participating artists. What came first: the documentary or the show?

MQ: The film was shot first, but I always considered the documentary, the exhibition, and the two radio programs I produced for Resonance 104.4FM to be different parts of “Letter from Istanbul.”

The research unfolded over three stages. The first was about delving into books covering Turkey’s past, present, or possible future. I needed to do this to get a working knowledge of Ottoman history, Kemalism, and the transition from secular nationalism to the conservative Islamic modernity of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). In the second stage of research I began to meet and talk to people, armed with that research. The third stage is when the primary and secondary research come together to inform the texts that are written and the questions for interviews conducted. Like most research, it’s important to know a hundred more details than I’ll use, and so all that work may not have been apparent to the casual viewer.

FR: You’ve expanded the format of the exhibition by complementing it with other media—namely the radio programs and the documentary film. When considering the project’s development, I’m interested to learn about the space between its original premise and its final outcome, and the roles that the different media played in its investigation of the cultural and sociopolitical context of modern Istanbul.

MQ: I’m still at that point in the project where it’s really hard to get an objective overview of what’s taken place. That said, I think one of my main reasons for using the documentary and radio programs alongside the installed exhibition was to make sure that people’s actual voices were being heard. Rather than speaking for anyone, I wanted to use my curatorial privilege to open up spaces for artists, sociologists, and citizens to speak, for their experience and firsthand knowledge to come through.

FR: The first thing one encounters when entering the gallery is a long list of names. Not well-known figures—politicians, or artists—but common names, spelled row after row after row.

MQ: These are the names of university lecturers in Istanbul who appeared on decree number 672, issued in the wake of the failed coup of July 2016. After the uprising, the Turkish government instituted a purge of people they deemed to be associated with the US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, who was accused of plotting the coup. Now, depending on who you talk to, Gülen is either the leader of an Islamic cult or the main figure behind a peaceable international movement to unify science and Islam (via creationism) through soft power channels and civic as opposed to party political engagement. The Gülen movement, which came about in the 1960s and gained ground after the military coup in 1980, was also affiliated with the AKP at the onset of that party’s route to power in the early 2000s.

The purge was announced through a series of online decrees listing the names of individuals to be sacked for their alleged links to Gülen. Hundreds if not thousands of innocent people found themselves cast as conspirators. They were dismissed from their jobs, barred from working anywhere else, and prevented from leaving the country. The sentence issued was one of slow financial, intellectual, spiritual, and most likely physical death.

I wanted those names to be the first thing people see in the space because they are the casualties hidden from public view. I thought about blowing up the front page of the decree to A3 or A2 size and sticking that over a section of the names so that the association would be clear, but it seemed too heavy handed. So instead I stuck the decree on the front table and placed different sections of it in the constellation surrounding Fatih Pınar’s work. I’m not sure how successful this was but, then again, judgments of success or failure on that front would presuppose I had the intention of provoking a set reaction from visitors, and I don’t think I did.

FR: The list is so extensive that the physical size of this group of names—which fills an entire wall—materializes the extent to which the political situation is affecting the lives of citizens. It also reflects on the role that culture in general, and artistic practices in particular, can play in responding to this. Indeed, “Letter from Istanbul” is not the typical exhibition about a city’s cultural scene, in which visitors are given an outline of who’s doing what right now. Instead, it is an attempt to grasp a moment whose past seems impossible to disentangle from its future, but that also reflects on the city’s movements for social emancipation, which now seem quite distant from the current reality. Would you be able to sum up the portrait of Istanbul drafted by the show?

MQ: In curating this show, I definitely wanted to avoid any essentialist portrait of the city. I can, however, speak about certain constraining forces—shaping civic life, urban development, and freedom—that emerged again and again in conversations with people, and were also mirrored in the topics covered in print journalism, sociology, and party politics.

It quickly became apparent that London and Istanbul are both going through accelerated processes of urban development. This is having a detrimental effect on certain positive sociocultural features in each city. London is being transformed into a metropolis of empty, high-rise luxury flats and land-banked homes catering to high and ultra high net worth individuals. In the abstract, the casualty of this process is the multicultural nature of the city; in the concrete, people are actually dying.

In Turkey, as one anonymous interviewee in the documentary states, Istanbul is being turned into a “touristic city,” what he calls a “city without any layers.” You can see and hear in the documentary that the city is in a constant state of construction and, from what I could gather from people, construction is in almost every case synonymous with erasure: not only buildings, but histories, people, emancipatory movements. Life, basically.

In both cities, elements of difference and diversity are being flattened out, and this is frequently a violent process that causes a great deal of harm to a great number of people. I also felt that there were traces of a reductive yet official, contradictory narrative based on reclaiming a mythical, and radically simplified, Ottoman history on the one hand and, on the other, by creating this flattened-out modern city. So Istanbul seemed to be a liminal city, not because of its placement between the East and the West but because it is caught between these two visions.

The sociocultural fallout from that dynamic formed a major part of the exhibition. So, rather than a portrait, one of the things I was aiming for was a snapshot of that present.

]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/%e2%80%9cletter-from-istanbul%e2%80%9d/feed/0Tamara Henderson’s “Seasons End: Panting Healer”http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/tamara-henderson%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cseasons-end-panting-healer%e2%80%9d/
http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/tamara-henderson%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cseasons-end-panting-healer%e2%80%9d/#commentsTue, 18 Jul 2017 09:04:53 +0000Tom Morton]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/?p=10040543A rule of thumb: hearing about other people’s trips abroad is boring. Another: hearing about their dreams is even worse. Given that the work of Tamara Henderson draws on the Canadian artist’s world-girdling nomadism (her CV is a litany of travel grants and residencies) and her own unconscious (past projects have seen her design quasi-modernist furniture while under hypnosis), then by rights it should function like a sleeping draught. In the best possible fashion, it does. To encounter the woozy, bewitching sculptures, paintings, and drawings that make up her exhibition “Seasons End: Panting Healer” at London’s Rodeo is to let slip the moorings of waking life and drift into a realm where stranger logics rule. As with dreams and drugs, or holidays and holy visions, perhaps the best advice with Henderson’s work is simply to go with it, and see where we fetch up.

First, though, some backstory. The Rodeo show is the third iteration of the artist’s “Seasons End” project, following those at the Mitchell Library (part of Glasgow International) and Los Angeles’s REDCAT in 2016 (two more are planned for 2017: a performance as part of London’s Serpentine Galleries’ “Park Nights” season on July 21 and an exhibition at Ontario’s Oakville Galleries, opening on September 24). In Glasgow, Henderson presented a large-scale diorama, centered on the Garden Photographer Scarecrow (all works 2016), a totemic, if rather rickety female figure made from foliage, lumpy upholstery, and tourist trinkets from Loch Ness. This piece was accompanied, among other elements, by 24 anthropomorphic sculptures, consisting of kimono-like garments on upright wooden supports, their fabric trimmed with a design resembling the sprocket holes found on rolls of film, and decorated with images and materials that alluded to the passing of time, including moon phases, dried potpourri flowers, and aging newspapers. The governing conceit, here, was that when the Mitchell was empty, the Scarecrow would record her surroundings using a pinhole camera. (By way of “proof,” the walls of Rodeo’s front office feature several grainy black-and-white shots of the diorama installed in the library’s grand Victorian reading room). As the artist has it: “While she stands she remembers; while she remembers she photographs; her nervous system is a system of flashbulbs.”

By the time the Scarecrow reappeared at REDCAT, she was no longer standing, and so presumably no longer remembering or taking photos. Lying moribund on a makeshift bed, her dehydrated vegetation crumbling onto the floor, she was ministered to by one of the garment sculptures, Panting Healer, whose white lace robes suggested at once a bride, a medic, and an angel. Following the REDCAT show, the Scarecrow was apparently cremated on a Californian beach. She is survived by Panting Healer, who features at Rodeo alongside 18 of its 23 compatriots. Positioned around the gallery space in loose duos and trios, they seem to be taking in Henderson’s paintings, such as The Camel and the Snail, in which the animal energies of an early twentieth-century Der Blaue Reiter canvas appear to have been becalmed by abstraction and a palette of dusty browns. Is this a private view? Maybe, although given the Scarecrow’s recent demise, it’s hard not to think of the garment sculptures as mourners at a wake.

Walking among these figures, we note their strange adornments: here a fascinator formed from a curling seashell, there a pair of boots stuck with postcards of a thistle, the grouchy cartoon cat Garfield, and a gleaming Brancusi bronze. The gallery space itself feels like it’s been prepped for some obscure ceremony, to which we may or may not have been invited. Glitchy music (is it a calypso?) plays on hidden speakers, the lighting rig is hung with colored neon strips, and the windows are draped with patchwork textiles, bearing images of hooded, slumbering eyes. While “Seasons End: Panting Healer” is, on one level, a feverish reverie, it also casts visitors in the role of anthropologists, conducting fieldwork among a previously unknown people. Studying the garment sculptures, we recognize that they are preoccupied, like all human-shaped beings, with the circle of night and day, of death and (re)birth, of seeds reaped and sown. Nevertheless, the precise contours of their cosmology remain naggingly unclear.

This elusiveness is all to the good. The power of Henderson’s art turns on the combination of its discombobulating surface detail and its ability to tug at something deep within us—the dim reaches of cultural memory, perhaps, or our fizzing lizard brains. While a garment sculpture such as Silverfish in Tuxedo (which features a swatch of foil emergency blanket, a brass dolphin, and a sprat-shaped key fob) appears to hum with hermetic symbolism, the artist is disinclined to provide a Rosetta Stone. Instead, we must rely on the stray visions this work prompts: of sunlight flashing through seawater onto panicked, darting fins; of adrenaline pumping through both predator and prey; of unruly life on the cusp of unruly death. Even the haziest dream world, it seems, has it moments of pin-sharp clarity.

]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/tamara-henderson%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cseasons-end-panting-healer%e2%80%9d/feed/0Mandla Reuterhttp://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/mandla-reuter/
http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/mandla-reuter/#commentsThu, 13 Jul 2017 17:22:08 +0000Ilaria Bombelli]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/?p=10040518The invitation to the third solo show by Mandla Reuter at Francesca Minini bears no title or explanation. It relies on just one image, evocative enough on its own: a moonless sea, rippled by waves. Even the press release, stripped of all syntax, is reduced to a chain of words that hint at some meaning but mostly conjure a mood. They include “water,” “island,” “forest,” “sewage,” “dusk,” “stamp,” ”chocolate,” and “remnants,” plus geographic locations, names of cities, and numerical measurements. So we visit the exhibition with this sea in our heads, so to speak, and a few inorganic clues.

At the entrance, the exotic image of a bronze cocoa pod (Cacao, 2017), along with other specimens still nestled within their plaster molds, summons all the various things associated with this fruit (prosperity, exploitation, luxury, poverty, etc.). The viewer’s gaze is immediately drawn—with the sense of the sea growing stronger—to a huge salvage airbag (its crate also exhibited nearby) whose hyperbolic bulk fills and almost seals off the gallery. This sort of obstruction is not a new device for the artist, who in the past has blocked gallery entrances with boulders so that visitors had to strain for a glimpse of the exhibition through the windows. This buoy, we are told, comes from the Isle of Wight and is used to recover wrecked vessels (the eloquent title is Atlantis, 2016). The sunken wreck is hooked on and the bag is slowly inflated, pulling it to the surface.

Everything beyond this trophyless float remains hidden from view until one goes all the way around. Behind it, scattered across the floor around an iron manhole cover, are about 30 water tanks (The Grid, 2015): the ordinary blue plastic kind, with the manufacturer’s label still stuck on. Viewers are told, though of course there’s no way to check, that this water is from the Amazon River, about 1000 liters that have traveled long and far through the skies before flowing into the artist’s Berlin studio (from Rio de Janeiro, via Los Angeles, Rotterdam, and Hamburg, as one can see from the waybills posted here and there on the walls).

We are also informed that we have moved from the surface of the sea to the surface of the earth, and the tanks and manhole cover are there to represent the urban grid of pipes and sewers. That in short, a city is laid out under our feet—the city of Iquitos (in northeast Peru), since we only need look at the manhole cover to read the delicately engraved name: a place described as something out of a fairy tale, it can only be reached by riverboat or plane, and this isolation is greatly emphasized. We are then invited to look up at a row of shimmering, purplish-bronze prints, a grille of gratings that echo the grid on the floor. We later learn that these are six sections of a single, hugely enlarged underwater photograph (Untitled, 2017), showing the stretch of riverbed from which the water in the tanks was taken.

In large part, this show by Mandla Reuter is about removing weight. The artist does this with the Amazon River, lifting its water through the sky, borne by the wind and clouds. Or he turns it upside down and dematerializes it into a bed of pixels—just as he once froze Niagara Falls in a diorama of light and color. He relieves a buoy of its tonnage, and a block of marble and a drainpipe (shown here in another room) of their inertia and weight, turning both into an allegory of fluidity: Fountain, 2015. Or he buys a plot of land in LA that apparently has an address (330 E Waldon Pl, Los Angeles, CA 90031) but doesn’t show up in the city’s land registry—this is one of his best-known works, Untitled (2016-17), exhibited here next to Fountain—and begins mailing letters to this chimerical domicile, which promptly come back to him (this exhibition features six missives sent from Panama, Mexico, Greece, and Italy: each is stamped “Return to sender. Not deliverable as addressed, unable to forward”), merely exacerbating its nonexistent status.

Most of all, Reuter strips weight from the notion of the world—the map, the globe—and gives it wings: at Francesca Minini, its time zones are condensed into the sodium lamps (blue for night, yellow for day) of Confusion Mystery (2017), the work many visitors see last, which plunges the gallery into an endless twilight. (In the photos from Prospect 330 E Waldon Pl [2011], another sunset also bled across the background of an upended LA.) And yet, the artist has an equally stubborn penchant for indirect vision—as well as panoramic overviews—for what is impregnable, inaccessible: the sealed envelope, the islands and unlocatable locations that turn up in his works, Waldon Place, the recesses and obstructions he creates, the roundabout detours we must take to view his works. For what is submerged, unexpected—which some call abstraction, others fiction. And which snakes across the surface of this exhibition in broad meanders, until it flows out into the real world. Like fresh water into brine.

]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/mandla-reuter/feed/0“The Garden—End of Times; Beginning of Times”http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/%e2%80%9cthe-garden%e2%80%94end-of-times-beginning-of-times%e2%80%9d/
http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/%e2%80%9cthe-garden%e2%80%94end-of-times-beginning-of-times%e2%80%9d/#commentsMon, 10 Jul 2017 23:18:21 +0000Isobel Harbison]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/?p=10040339The inaugural ARoS Triennial, “The Garden—End of Times; Beginning of Times,” opened in Aarhus, 2017’s European Capital of Culture, on the morning that Donald Trump stood in the White House garden and announced his plans to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. ARoS’s director, Erlend Høyersten, promises that this exhibition “will thematize man’s coexistence with, and view on, nature … over a period of 400 years.” Such scrutiny is certainly timely.

The exhibition is installed across three thematic sections, “The Past” in the ARoS Art Museum; “The Present” in the city’s docklands; and “The Future” on its coastline and forest to the south. “The Past” includes 108 works (predominantly paintings) hung in purpose-built galleries painted dark Victorian green. First up are three of Thomas Struth’s “Paradise” series of C-prints (1999, 2005, 2006) all dense, green thickets, “unconscious places” he’s been photographing since 1998. Then appears a room with three large plinths supporting unattributed backlit images of historic Western gardens, French (Versailles), English (a park in Wiltshire), and American (New York’s Central Park). They’re unsightly and unnecessary pedagogical tools, given how regularly this exhibition strays from the leitmotif of the garden. A subsequent hang of Franz Rösel von Rosenhof’s paintings of Paradise Before the Fall of Man (1690/5) and Earth After the Fall of Man (1690) offers before and after shots of earthly paradise’s nosedive into chaos, with animals scattering in pandemonium. This pair introduces the exhibition’s most potent narrative thread, the historic scourge of humans upon nature.

Rooms progress from Baroque and Rococo landscapes to Enlightenment botanical prints, Expressionist and Nordic paintings of the sublime (Edvard Munch’s somber coastline at dusk, Vinter Ved Nordstrand, 1900, is a highlight), to an odd display of Surrealist works (in a section called, rather sinisterly, “Botany of the mind”), and several Land Art pieces, before opening into a sequence of engaging, if diverse, installations by artists including Olafur Eliasson’s Beauty (1993), Diana Thater’s Chernobyl (2011), Joan Jonas’ Light Time Tales (2014), and Darren Almond’s Sometimes Still (2010). Contemporary works occasionally creep back in time. Yinka Shonibare’s sculpture The Swing (After Fragonard) (2001) shows a headless mannequin in a billowing robe à la française fabricated in African Batik print, swinging forward from a branch in the gallery corner. Displayed opposite a similar composition to that upon which it is based, Antoine Watteau’s The Swing (1712), Shonibare’s material alteration asks what was happening in other parts of the world while European nobility frolicked in well-tended gardens. Agnes Denes’s 12 C-prints, Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan (1982) are displayed alongside six paintings by Norwegian artist-cum-horticulturalist Nikolai Astrup; against his dark, neo-romantic rural scenes painted between 1909 and 1920, Denes’s airy photographs of a wheat field harvested in Battery Park below the growing Manhattan skyline remind us that real estate is the most lucrative form of modern, rentier farming.

Outside the museum, in a repurposed building on the docks, seven artists’ works are shown. Herbarium (2006–16) marks Ismar Cirkinagic’s return to his native Bosnia to pick and classify the flora that has grown on mass graves from the war (1992–95). A salon-style display of pressed plants on paper are hung here, each with their plant genus and species hand noted in their lower margin, along with the number of how many bodies its underlying grave contained. This intimate memorial provides a stark reminder that nature is adaptive, that our bodies are destined for compost and that human life will succumb to a much grander cycle.

Lucian Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2012) is equally affecting. This feature-length documentary was shot on industrial fishing ships off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts with waterproof cameras fastened to the heads of fishers and crew, dangling (as Turner allegedly did to research The Fighting Temeraire, 1838) from the decks and masts. Excellently lit against a dark sea, the footage of the rusty decking, sea surface, and physical demands of fishing is immersive, but the business it shows seems both hostile and brutal. That the film is so powerful only makes it more disappointing that so few other works in the triennial address human industry as the most pervasive threat to the ecosystems that nourish us.

The elegant handling of violent relations between humans and nature permeates the triennial’s most compelling works, but cruelty seeps into some of its weakest. E.B. Itso’s Blue Room (2017) recreates a blue-walled screening space in Snake River Correctional Institution, Ohio, where those in solitary confinement can spend their daily 40 minutes’ open-air time watching projected archive footage of the natural world. The aim seems to be to provide viewers with the same depression-busting tranquility the inmates supposedly experience during these viewing sessions, as explored by ecologist Nalini Nadkarni. However, the circumstances of these two viewing environments are so at odds that this restaging reads as a crude and barbarous transposition. The work displays a staggering lack of empathy for those interned by a much scrutinized, heavily biased US judicial system and a blindness to how works of art might reinforce hierarchies and divisions created across different social institutions. All I can see in this work is the legitimization of a brutal choice between fresh air and moving images presented to one social group by another: of nature’s image instrumentalized by power. Footage of bears in forests is very hard to stomach in this context.

Doug Aitken’s The Garden (2017) is equally unsettling. Set within its own darkened warehouse, Aitken has produced a white, minimally furnished apartment, enclosed in a spot-lit glass cuboid surrounded by a meticulously planted bed of rubber plants. It’s an Anger Room, a contained space where people can let off steam by wrecking things during timed sessions with (scientifically disputed) therapeutic effects.(1) Triennial visitors can sign up to destroy this interior, which is freshly furnished daily. And the spectacle is streamed onto the triennial’s website, which adds an element of showmanship to the piece, or “voyeurism,” according to Aitken. When I’m there, a young man seems to enjoy annihilating the room with a baseball bat. Again, I’m not clear what I’m supposed to be seeing here apart from gratuitous violence and the production of an obscene amount of landfill, which is, surely, beside the point. And encountered in sequence, Aitken’s piece has a disconcerting relationship to Itso’s—legitimizing violence in white cubes, while anaesthetizing violent Others in blue ones. Human nature at its worst seems to be the common ground.

Several poetic interventions appear elsewhere. Cyprien Gaillard’s Understory (2017) is an exquisite black terrazzo floor installed in the toilet area of a cavernous dive bar called Shen Mao. Dense constellations of inlaid mother-of-pearl around the toilet bowl twinkle like a sky at night, while angling us toward the drainage system below. Oscar Lhermitte’s Urban Stargazing (2011–17) encourages us to look upwards at his artificial constellations of carefully arranged LED lights, positioned from two spots in the harbor. Along the coastline, between the harbor and the forest to its south, Alicja Kwade has made a clever new sculptural work, Be-Hide (2017), where a real boulder faces its aluminum duplicate, divided by a double-sided mirror. It presents a trompe l’oeil effect where steely boulder and industrial background are reflected on the horizon against the forested shoreline, and as we move around the piece from the other direction natural elements appear transposed onto the port view north. In a path through that forest, Sarah Sze’s Untitled (2017) is a delicate hammock woven in indigo blue thread, hanging across a tiny valley under a pedestrian bridge, and with a soft beaded detail faintly visible on its threading and below on the woodland ground. There’s a careful consideration of site in these works and a delight in nature that’s somehow consoling.

The sections’ nomenclatures are questionable given that The Past contains many contemporary works, while those in The Present and The Future display no particular loyalty to either term but instead demarcate physical zones where works are sited. We’re advised by the curators to understand them as unfixed classifications, which of course, in real terms, they are. But there’s something particularly amiss with this titling given how, through the gallery, city, coast, and forest, this triennial largely aestheticizes nature while avoiding environmental issues. Exhibitions dealing with the natural world that rest largely on the “scenic” feel badly timed when what we’re facing is an absolute obliteration of it (and the distant dream of a garden of our own), based on the mistreatment of our environment, and often our own neighbors within it. They’ll be no positive change before we can acknowledge our own violence: there’ll be no future if we keep resting on the picturesque of the past.

(1) Claire Martin, “Anger Rooms: A Smashing New Way to Relieve Stress,” New York Times, November 26, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/business/anger-rooms-a-smashing-new-way-to-relieve-stress.html.

]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/%e2%80%9cthe-garden%e2%80%94end-of-times-beginning-of-times%e2%80%9d/feed/0“At this stage”http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/at-this-stage/
http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/at-this-stage/#commentsMon, 10 Jul 2017 15:02:21 +0000Travis Diehl]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/?p=10040419Where to begin? Where else but at this stage? A cotton boll embalmed in a bell jar like the Disney rose in Beauty and the Beast (1991): Aria Dean’s Dead Zone (1) (2017) gives the rose’s place to a white commodity once harvested by black people made commodities. The cotton stands there like a badly conserved museum piece that still reeks of shame. But there is a current charge, too: viewers can take their photos, but they’ll have to wait to post them. Under the bell jar’s oversized base, Dean has hidden a signal jammer modeled on the ones Beyoncé’s bodyguards use to scramble any cell phone in the star’s radius. We are at the stage where a celebrity needs military-grade technology to stage-manage their image—and meanwhile in the ongoing spree of police murdering black Americans, video evidence earns no justice, only spectacle.

Dean’s is the first piece inside gallery Chateau Shatto for this summer of 2017; this is a topical group show, and the topic is a gut check of American exceptionalism. At this stage! The phrase suggests a sequence, a disease—progression, if not progress—like the shot holding on a film of a skyscraper in Sturtevant ‘Warhol Empire State’ (1972). In Sturtevant’s revision the Empire the building stands for is laminated to the Empire of Andy Warhol, an ambivalent, postmodern reverie whose scope ranges from race riots to mass goods, celebrity- and death-spectacle included. Jordan Wolfson’s 2009 video Con Leche plays on a monitor just behind the Sturtevant. Warholish ranks of animated glass Diet Coke bottles march on little pink feet through footage of a blighted city. Milk sloshes at their mouths—a white liquid where you’d expect a brown one. Control, modulation, and abuse are all of a piece: a female voice actor reads extracts from message boards while a male voice (Wolfson) gives her directions like, “Can you please normalize your speech.” At one point the work’s racial undertones spill over, and the voiceover describes—practically in a panic—that despite going to school with “black folks” she’s “never been part of what I’d consider a friend relationship with someone black.” “Can you pause? Thank you,” says Wolfson—“Can you please decrease your volume.”At this stage, time for an honest display of our grossest contradictions.

We are on the stage, too, cartoonishly re-performing cartoon violence. For Western Exterminator / Kernel Kleenup / Little Man / Pesterminator (2013–15), by Parker Ito, a dozen statuettes clatter into the gallery’s back corner. Each is a version of the registered trademark of Western Exterminator, an L.A.-based pest control company: a top-hatted capitalist, one hand admonishing a hungry mouse, the other gripping a mallet behind his back. The bronze statuettes are variegated with automotive finishes; some are dismembered, some Swiss-cheesed with holes. InCafé L.A. (2015), by Body by Body, the storefront of something called “Café U.S.A.” is depicted in a CNC-routed relief behind a set of powdercoated black bars. In the windows are the silhouettes of a cop with nightstick poised, two sets of hands raised in self-defense. Bunny Rogers’s video, Mandy Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016), sets a Mandy Moore-like CGI character behind a piano at the site of an infamous school shooting. (The Columbine cafeteria, of course, is also where security cameras captured chilling footage of the killers.) The girl plays three Elliott Smith tunes, sloshing red wine on the drifting snow, a composite of the late-90s’ early-oughts’ most cliché images of violence, suicide, and teen angst. The piece is a reminder that the United States has been in a saccharine self-immolation for some time.

The gallery’s storefront window has been covered with a vinyl print by Martine Syms: a grainy halftone image of a parked white car, which asks, via a speech bubble, “WANT SOME?” Syms’s title replies: Some What? (2016). “Some What?” feels naïve, or parrying—but if the car’s solicitation has the tang of a threat, Syms’s response turns it toward a conversation. Like kids who weren’t yet born in 2001 making 9/11 memes, we haven’t “processed” our trauma very well—or maybe we have processed that trauma exactly, and to render a traumatic image is our best shot at critique. In the middle of the gallery is Flagwaste (Stars and Stripes) (2016)by Gardar Eide Einarsson, a waist-deep pile of red, white, and blue flag scraps that it turns out aren’t destroyed American flags but the trimmings from a flag factory. This, too—mass commodification and its LOLZ-ification—is that for which it stands. Meanwhile Dean’s signal jammer throws a twenty-foot-wide break, and if to “depict” this present moment with a collapsing detachment is all art can manage, at least that might provide for some clarity in the United States’s little nation-picture.

This is the phrase that appears on a billboard above the bleachers at the central courtyard of La Rural fair and congress center, a neuralgic space of Argentine agricultural policy with deep symbolic and affective roots. On May 23, in the same space where several Argentine presidents—from Juan Domingo Perón to Mauricio Macri through Jorge Rafael Videla and Cristina Kirchner—have given impassioned speeches to the masses, several roller derby skaters circled around, while in the arena artist Osías Yanov made holes in the ground using different geometric iron structures, simulating a kind of acupuncture on the site.

The appealing and challenging performance, entitled Antena Vaginal (Vaginal Antenna) (2017), was part of “rro,” a program curated by Javier Villa and Sarah Demeuse for arteBA 2017. During the action, when Yanov showed part of his butt and laid it on the ground, one of the fairground’s security guards watching the event shouted at him to stop. This could simply be one more anecdote of the reactions that arise at this type of art event when held outside of art spaces, but I found it a clear indication of where we were, taking into account the guard’s manifest awareness of the place—the site that defines agriculture’s fundamental role in the national political landscape, where cultivating one’s land is serving one’s country—and the rigorous morals it engenders.

Another forum contesting official national narratives during arteBA was the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, where the collection had been rearranged with “Verboamérica,” a new exhibition curated by Andrea Giunta and Agustín Pérez Rubio. It is part of the museum’s larger research project that brings postcolonial history to the forefront. The presentation goes beyond a typical chronological narrative, instead grouping works into thematic sections in which different formats and historical moments co-exist, making the crisis of linearity and singularity in historical time evident. In spite of an excessive accumulation of works in some sections, the rewriting of this extensive collection is decidedly meaningful, opening up the possibility of manifold historical approaches and readings. A catalogue brings together a glossary of key terms—“Activism,” “Destructive Art,” “Military Dictatorship,” “Madi,” “Postcolonialism,” “LGBT”—that are all linked to the works of this collection, and come from the artistic, social, and cultural experience of Latin America, making a rewriting of its modern and contemporary history possible.

At the Museo de Arte Moderno, we find another proposal that delves into new ways of reading between the lines of a collection. “El presente está encantador” [The present is charming], an extravagant project by Diego Bianchi, posits a new way of putting the museum’s heritage in motion. Bianchi’s installation creates a theatrical and suffocating entrance through a corridor that surrounds the whole space, leading viewers to an area where, among strange sounds and colorful blinking lights, innumerable mannequins, weird anthropomorphic figures made by different discarded materials, disembodied torsos, and found objects emerge as devices, situations, and scaffolding for the circulation, exhibition, and perception of historical pieces. Included in the installation are artworks from the museum collection—from Argentine artists anchored to the modernist tradition such as Norberto Gómez, Alberto Heredia, and Margarita Paksa. Bianchi deals with the collection as an artist, away from historicisms or curatorial prejudices, using historical objects as living elements full of meaning and narrative, that when gathered in the present, generate a new, unprecedented scenario.

In the Villa Crespo area, two of the city’s most active and interesting galleries offer proposals that explore extremely contemporary issues. In its two spaces, Slyzmud unfolds an essay-exhibition curated by Larisa Zmud and Alan Segal, “Los Derivados” [The Derivatives], which investigates the intricate relationship between productivity and affect in contemporary irregular and schizophrenic work environments. Works by Mercedes Azpilicueta, Martin Touzón, and Alex Martinis Roe, among others, reveal a fragmented plot that hints at the contradictions in our current lives. Madeline Hollander’s site-specific performance, 365 (2017), takes place on the streets between the gallery spaces. Six performers follow a twelve-step movement series—one for each month in a year—around two cement trucks, whose cargo rotates 365 times, equivalent to one year.

Nora Fisch Gallery presents the particular and intimate work of Fernanda Laguna, an essential artist in Argentina with great importance at the intersection of art and activism. Laguna transforms the gallery into a paper castle that hosts a series of videos in which the artist can be seen explaining her practice, commenting on the situation of the Argentine (or any peripheral) artist in the global network. On the second floor, a second exhibition, “Mareadas por la marea” [Dizzy from the tide], curated by Laguna and Cecilia Palmeiro, gathers different objects and documents from the recent wave of feminist marches in Argentina. It is both the record of that experience as a space for reflection about how a revolutionary process is lived, and the exploration of the materials of an affective revolution found in personal archives. Laguna is an artist who, despite frequenting museums and galleries, often places herself on the sidelines, such as with the various projects and independent collectives she’s founded since the late 1990s. The art space and publishing house Belleza y Felicidad [Happiness and Beauty], for example, operated in the Almagro neighborhood until 2008, while opening a “branch” in Villa Fiorito, a shantytown in Lomas de Zamora, in 2003.

La Ene equally locates itself on the periphery of the art circuit. It emerged seven years ago from within the artistic community as an independent project that performs as a museum. An experiment on the connection between the artist, the institutions, and existing forms of legitimation, it focuses on artists who thrive outside the art system, reflecting on how to provide a place for them. Currently on view is “Una época/Ninguna época” [A time/No time], a show curated by Tobias Dirti and Martin F. Halley that takes up grunge aesthetics as a rejection of restrictive and transient fashions.

And if there is any artist who does not fit into a particular mold, it is Xul Solar, whose retrospective exhibition “Pan-Activista” can be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts. A quintessential figure for understanding the history of the local avant-garde, Solar attempts to transform existing knowledge systems such as language, music, writing, and esoteric thinking, with the ultimate goal of achieving global unity through a system of “universal reforms.” He created two languages ​​and a new writing system, transformed instruments and musical notation, made changes to tarot cards, and imagined future cities, among other inventions. While I was among his fascinating objects and drawings, I remembered some words from one of “rro” emails, stating the curators’ intent to celebrate the absurd and the imaginary, and the urgency of touching the present—something Solar certainly did in his time. This thought seemed to crystallize a mood in the air in Buenos Aires in my walks between these different venues: the responsibility to inquire into the past to grasp a deep understanding of how we got here, and the urgency of establishing connections between our absurd present and the legacies of the past from unconventional positions.

]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/buenos-aires-roundup/feed/0Anna Louise Richardson’s “On the hunt”http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/anna-louise-richardson%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9con-the-hunt%e2%80%9d/
http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/anna-louise-richardson%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9con-the-hunt%e2%80%9d/#commentsThu, 06 Jul 2017 14:48:46 +0000Claudia Arozqueta]]>http://www.art-agenda.com/?p=10040375There is no animal in this country that does that type of thing. It was the size of a giant tiger. It was about a meter long and had black, silky fur.

The belief in the existence of elusive, strange, fabulous, and extraterrestrial animals is ubiquitous and timeless. Predatory giant turtles, oversized snakes, and fantastic hybrids are abundant in both Ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology. And even today, in our technologically advanced modern society, mystical animals continue to be part of our imaginary and folklore. Among such popular figures are phantom cats or Alien Big Cats: large predatory felines that, although not native to the United States, Europe, and the Antipodes, reportedly roam in the wilderness of these regions. Some witnesses believe that these elusive felines are ghosts or evil creatures.(1) Others suggest that they are escaped circus or zoo animals or exotic pets, or their descendants,(2) while most consider them regular dogs, cats, and foxes, transformed by overly active imaginations.(3) Books and articles are dedicated to the subject of these cats; amateur organizations have been founded to collect and catalogue evidence; and a pseudoscience, cryptozoology, studies their existence, as well as those of other fantastical entities, such as the chupacabra and the yeti.

Living on a farm in Western Australia, an area where phantom cats have been reported over several decades, artist Anna Louise Richardson has researched the narratives that surround them. “On the hunt,” her recent solo exhibition at Galerie Pompom, is a continuation of these studies. The 15 figurative drawings on view, all made with charcoal on cement fiberboard, use images sourced from books, newspapers, and online publications to provide clues about the mysteries of the phantom cat.

On the gallery’s central wall, a rectangular, 12-piece polyptych recalls a detective board with images referring to investigations. Standing out with its intense and silky dark color is the dramatic portrait of a fierce Black Panther (all works 2017). In Britain, people have witnessed giant black felines, perhaps related to ancestral stories about the Black Dog, a mythical creature that, as in Richardson’s drawing, roams moorland areas. For more than a century, people in Australia’s Western and Eastern states have also reported the sighting of big black felines, mostly in the wilderness of the Blue Mountains region. The Trespassers that enter in the night into farms are said to walk through any Fence, leaving only scraps of fur, paw prints, and livestock carcasses as traces. But photographic and video evidence analyzed by local zoologists and agriculture specialists concluded that the entities were large domestic felines. The same happened with Jaws, the carcass of a cat that washed up on a beach in Western Australia, considered a monster or an Alien Big Cat. Perhaps that is why, in Phantom Cat, Richardson depicts a white feline silhouette in a dark meadow, in which viewers can only project their own imagination. And it is this imaginative faculty that makes some phantom cat followers believe that the Thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, is still out there, living and hunting in the fields. But the dog-looking carnivorous marsupial, like the phantom cats, was considered a threat to cattle, and farmers hunted it to extinction in the 1930s.

On an adjacent wall, a drawing with a herd of Foxes roaming in the night, and another of a cat carrying a Brushtail prey in its mouth, identifies these animals as the real culprits of phantom cats’ alleged attacks, many of which have been solved by genetic testing and comparisons of Paws. The drawings installed on this wall are meticulous and bold, like those in the polyptych, but their frames reduce the brightness and rough textures that make the pieces effective. Nevertheless, the medium of charcoal feels appropriate for these subjects because it is, just like the traces of a cat, a natural and erasable material, easy to reshape or manipulate.

“On the hunt” is a clever study exploring the imagery of contemporary mythologies in rural areas, and thus humans’ relationship with nature. Phantoms cats are an obsessive and persecutory form onto which people’s fears of the environment can be projected. These fears have proven to be as creative as they are destructive: they propel imaginative storytelling about these animals, and yet real species disappear as humans lay claim to the earth for their own exclusive use. Chasing the non-existent is an endless endeavor, a pool for imagination, and, as in cryptozoology, a rejection of modern science and control. But no matter how ludicrous phantom cats might be, in Richardson’s drawings, these magical animals and their stories keep their allure.